Emergency Session 94: Phase Two of The “Down” Method

In this episode we move to phase TWO of the “down” challenge for food motivated and non-food motivated dogs. I’ll talk about an interesting discovery from listeners from the Czech Republic and Sweden and how their “crazy stay in place” situation is nothing like that! Life is proceeding pretty much the same there as it was before March.

So we we talked about sweeping the leg and your proximity to the floor in the phase one of the training. The goal in this phase is to wean yourself off of that proximity to the floor. We’ll go back to those phase one elements of time first, then distraction.

Overview

• Train in different contexts
• Train through the whole arc of behavior with distractions
• Use natural transitional rewards as you do small snippets of practice throughout the day

Emails

• Cheryl from Ann Arbor, Michigan – She got her dog Oscar introduced well to the sit and the down. But he is confused between both sit and down. I’ll talk about how to help your dog distinguish between them.
• Sandra from Texas has an interesting question – and apparently has my voice from the podcasts in her head (Sorry, Sandra!)